Learning By Connecting

            I have always been fascinated by learning, and for most of my life, I have devoted time and energy to it, both inside and outside of formal classes. I am a student right now, actually, in a TESOL certificate program at Missouri State University, and that has me hitting the books and writing papers and taking tests for the first time in years. However, I am also trying to learn more about a number of subjects on my own. Geography is one. I enjoy reading about countries of the world; in my spare time I like to see how quickly I can fill the names of countries into a blank map. I’m getting pretty good—fast, and clear on the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia, Guyana and French Guiana, Malawi and Mozambique.

            I teach writing and speaking to international students, and right now (in fact, at this moment, as I write along with them on the overhead projector) they are writing an essay about their unique learning styles. It is a good question to ask—What kind of learner are you? For my students, the answers run the gamut, from the styles American students are well versed in—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—to their more personal preferences, like studying with others or listening to music while they work. (If my students end up being the ones who come up to you at the start of the first session of your lit class to announce that they are kinesthetic learners and may require appropriate accommodations, I apologize, and wish you well with the challenge of applying tactile elements to your lesson plans on Jane Austen’s Emma or William Wordsworth’s The Prelude.)

            My students’ assignment has me thinking about my own learning style, which is as idiosyncratic as anyone’s. For me, learning starts with seeing, whether that is with words on a page or pictures on a website. As I read, I get snagged on interesting words, and then sound takes over. Encountering a musical name like “Tannu Tuva” sends me Googling—what does Tuva look like? What do the people there do?

            Turns out that this formerly independent state is now part of the Russian Federation, and Tannu Tuva is no more. The area is properly called the Tyva Republic. It is a lush, green place, not unlike Montana in appearance. One thing that some people there do, as it turns out, is throat-singing—a method of song-making that allows them to produce multiple notes in the back of the throat. Tuva, as it turns out, was an interesting place, well worth learning more about.

            My brief exploration into Tannu Tuva is indicative of my own learning style—independent, natural, sporadic, curious, disorganized. I love factoids and I love people, and there is nothing more fascinating than learning how people in other places get through their days.

            It’s something that fascinates me about my students, too. What is life like in Gujarat, in western India? What is it like in a smaller, history-rich city in China? In Riyadh? I wonder—and I ask. My learning style means that they tell me a detail about their country and I Google away, trying to imagine where they’re from, what they’re about, what they do and love and play and sing and eat.

            I know that they’re a lot of fun to spend time with. They’re good-natured, and they go along with my sometimes-bizarre lesson plans. They are happy to write and speak and share their truths, and they have gotten over their fear of making a mistake, abandoning it in favor of their desire to communicate something essential.

            I guess my own learning style, if I’m to conclude our assignment, is to position myself in the vicinity of fascinating people and bug them until I begin to know some things they know. It is to reveal aspects of my own life so that they will, out of a sense of decorum or pity, reciprocate with details from theirs. It is, in short, to forge connections where I can.

           

            

Andrew Jackson's Parrot

            Andrew Jackson’s parrot, Poll, was ejected from his funeral for his use of blue language.

            This fact gives me pleasure, if indeed it is a fact. More likely it’s just a baseless story, like George Washington’s wooden teeth. It turns out that when you marry the richest woman on the continent, like George did, you can afford dentures made of human teeth, gold, and hippopotamus ivory (although all the wealth in the world couldn’t save him from the lifelong misery caused by his inflamed gums).

            I encountered this story about Poll the parrot quite a while back, but I thought of it again recently after a question came up on Trivia Crack, my latest addiction. Trivia Crack is an aptly named app that pits players against challengers, either friends or strangers, to answer questions about history, entertainment, the arts, sports, geography, and science. Although I’m a lifelong sports fan, you would never know it by my performance in that category, where my accuracy hovers around the 79 percent mark.

            I don’t know what it is about besting complete strangers over sets of fairly obvious questions, but I confess—I like it. I do not like losing to friends, something that happens with some frequency, so I just avoid them, and instead I opt to impress strangers with my knowledge of the fact that Vincent Van Gogh was Dutch and the chemical symbol for Sodium is Na—really heady stuff, in other words.

            It seems to me that young people may not understand the way we used to live in the years before WiFi. If we didn’t know a fact, we would argue about it, ideally over drinks.

Van Gogh was Belgian.

No, I swear he was Dutch.

Van Gogh is clearly a Belgian name.

Oh, yeah? Well, I’ve been to Dutch, and I was in Van Gogh’s house. I even saw where his ear was buried. There’s a stone.

And that last person of course is adjudged correct, the “I’ve been to …” sort of the adult equivalent of the double-dog dare—the logical end of the discussion, or the illogical one, as the case may be. At any rate, it is usually the loudest.

These days, if we wonder where Van Gogh was from, a half-dozen people pull out their phones and check. Before you can take enough sips to stop caring, you know beyond a doubt that Van Gogh was born in Zundert, Netherlands, that his middle name was Willem, that no one ever found the gun responsible for his so-called self-inflicted gunshot wound.

I don’t doubt that we have a richer life because of our access to information—no one loves a good factoid more than I do. All I really know is that it’s far less rewarding to be a loudmouth in the current climate, and that hurts some of us more than others.

Enter Trivia Crack, which lets me jab my finger in the air and proclaim that, yes, Nashville is the capital of Tennessee, and touch is the first sense a baby develops, and the first modern Olympic Games were held in 1900. (No? Hell!)

The bluster of the pointless debate is rich. Although mistakes are quickly noted and turns are lost as a result, it is good to try to one-up strangers. And bluster makes me think of no one so much as Andrew Jackson, that old Presbyterian warrior, sitting alone in a room and cussing a blue streak beside his dead wife’s gray parrot until his own dying day.

            I think I would like to live a life like that—loud and at turns pious or profane—so that at its end, some dumb animal might curse my departure, shock everyone with his vehemence.